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vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

Just finished a full rewatch of the Venture Brothers and, some winces in the early seasons aside1, I think it hangs together remarkably well and finishes very strong. The show made a deep impression on my sense of humor circa 2006-2010 and I could blather for hours about it, but here I want to focus specifically on its depiction of "hero technologists". Spoilers for pretty much the whole show follow.

So a very plainly stated surtext of the show is that Rusty's father Actually, No Really, Sucks. After the first couple seasons where he's depicted as this impossibly brilliant, powerful, handsome, perfect father figure from a Golden Age of Super-Science, Dr Jonas Venture Sr is gradually revealed to be a callous father and, eventually, a truly horrible person, a much more real life kind of villain than the cartoon baddies he battled. The show's pitch at conception was "if Jonny Quest were real, he'd be a pretty fucked up kid (in a pulpy exciting mess of a world)" and it's useful to delve both backward and forward from that.

Jonas and his obvious inspiration, Dr Benton Quest, are generational riffs on the older tradition of adventure fiction going back to turn-of-the-20th pulp heroes like Doc Savage and Tom Swift. Looking back at adventure fiction of that era from 2024, one of the most striking things is how vivid they are as artifacts of colonialism - the conquered lands of nonwhite people provide endless exotic backdrops for heroic white guy adventures; the genre essentially wouldn't exist as we know it without the bloodstains of 19th century imperial conquests. Jonny Quest was able to invoke this stuff - the depictions of "savages", plundered treasures, etc - with the ease of something already deeply familiar to its audience.

Reading up on these old stories I came across the term "Edisonade", invented specifically for adventure stories with science-focused heroes. Edison was of course a real-life scientist who essentially parlayed the ripple effects of the 18th century Age of Invention into the status and wealth of a 19th century robber baron, and even during his lifetime became this mythologized figure, a man said to be creating the future of humanity. This was a specific kind of "pluck and luck" story that sold like hotcakes in early 20th century America, and stayed strong through the post-WW2 boom - with the "American Dream" still credible and the atomic age underway, it was easy to imagine that scientist-entrepreneurs were our Prometheans, our torchbearers. It was very easy, then, to dream up a Dr Quest in the 1960s.

And for Gen X kids who grew up on reruns of that - and silver and bronze age superhero comics, and a bit later Reagan-era hypercapitalist "toy commercial cartoons" like GI Joe - it was pretty natural, as the postmodern era set in, to start cracking jokes about that old stuff, taking it apart, digging deeper. The triumph of The Venture Brothers is that Doc, Jackson, and their collaborators dug around in the dusty old toybox of pop culture with an adult's creative acumen, and broad enough cultural horizons to drag in a joyful smattering of pop music and underground culture and fine art, and brought forth as much humanity as they managed to.

So this is how we get our focal character in Rusty Venture, a former boy hero who is now a washed up scientist in the Twilight of Super-Science. He leaves college in the late 1980s and, plenty of personal failings aside, sets out to be a super scientist in an age where very few of his father's super science promises remain unfulfilled. And that's an interesting point: despite the fact that Jonas + Venture Industries developed, during the 1950s-70s, a 2001-style space station, a supersonic jet, hover bikes and hover shoes, communicator watches, invisibility tech, human cloning, autonomous humanoid robots, RoboCop-style cyborgs - despite all this, present day Venture-verse history looks very much like our own; we never see ordinary people using these inventions, they demonstrably did not eliminate poverty or reshape society. It kinda seems like these inventions were mostly just... toys for Team Venture to play adventurer with, and for Jonas Sr specifically to get rich off. Tellingly, the Venture tech we see people actually using are the 2010s2-vintage consumer electronics that Jonas Jr - consistently shown to be far more mature and altruistic than both his father and his brother - develops, before a premature death from cancer that is clearly Jobs-tinged but without any of Jobs' infamous enfant terrible tendencies. Rusty is a failure, but what is there left for him, for super science as a whole, to invent? The show makes a running joke of his ridiculous answers for "what's next", which land precisely because we're so used to being sold the same kind of inane crap from late night infomercials and, more recently, ad-funded social media - and this crap frequently invokes the aesthetics of The Future, but increasingly one that we know will never arrive.

Contemporary tech industry critique - of companies like Facebook, Google, etc - is often incorrectly portrayed as only getting started in the post-2016 era, but it has definitely entered full mainstream consciousness since then. I would honestly be surprised if the show's creators were specifically thinking of that body of critique when they were writing the later seasons. But I think they found their way to these ideas - of the wheels gradually falling off the notion that technological advancement (as defined somewhat narrowly, first by the military industrial complex and later by the adtech industry) was one and the same as humanity's path into the 21st century and beyond, leaving us hollow and unfulfilled, rudderless in the face of the mounting crises of capitalism - by way of thinking deeply enough about their subjects, sparing no sacred cows and being willing to examine the ideologies implicit in their inspirations, and excavating humor and humanity from the bizarre bullshit of modern life.

And I think the story they wound up telling ends up being a pretty decent articulation of this dynamic, this crisis of ideology squatting between us and our future, and what it feels like to live inside it, with a head full of pop music and Saturday morning cartoons, and futures that never panned out.


  1. I'd be willing to bet there are already some strong, good-faith social justice critiques of the Venture Brothers' early writing out there, but to summarize: the show started in 2003 and was written by two Gen X white guys, and it has more than a little of the "edgy" jokes you'd expect - some ableist language we'd now consider slurs, use of "gay" as a pejorative, some transphobia. I couldn't blame anyone starting the show today for finding those to be deal breakers. But I also find it all quite mild in comparison to, say, "what's the most awful shit South Park did during that same period". And by the middle of the show's run that stuff fades away and nothing of value to the material is lost (and indeed, it gets stronger as the creators develop their craft).

  2. For world building purposes, the show gets deliberately slippery with dates as it goes on, as it took about 20 years of real world time to depict 2-5 years of fictional time.


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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

Jonas Jr. isn't exactly a perfect character either. He has a veneer of altruism but it's clearly enrobing a massive level of narcissism and self-aggrandization. He does at least manage to actually invent things and make something of his talents while Rusty is languishing in his father's shadow, but he still hasn't made the world a better place, he just does a better job of looking like a good guy.

Fantastic post. Venture Bros. had action scenes and laugh-out-loud moments but the thing about it that always stuck out to me as I watched it while I was much too young to be watching it, was the somber, sort of contemplative tone it had more often than not. Moments of just talking or emoting, with no background music. It wasn't quite like there was a sense of resignation or failure or misery, but more like "these characters want something that isn't being given to them". You put into words where that feeling came from beautifully.

Does Rusty even try to move out of his rut of half-assing things for quick money? It's like the current startup-tech funk: nothing's worth inventing, because nothing will give ridiculous piles of money fast.